A new project. Again!!!

I’ve found yet another project to keep me busy. I’ve been running my own firewall on an older linux based system, K6/166 with low memory and a small hard drive. It’s in an old style AT Desktop case that takes up a corner of my living room. I’ve been wanting to replace it with a smaller router for awhile, but could never find a hardware one that did what I wanted. One of the main sticking points was the lack of an oidentd package that would forward the ident requests to the appropriate internal system. I’d been digging around for board-level products with two ethernet ports and a linux compatible processor. All of them were in the $300-600 range or didn’t even have a site you could order them from.

So I stuck with my K6/166. But today I ran into a project that could finally change all of that. http://openwrt.org/

It’s a linux distro… For Linksys WRT54G routers! It’s perfect. Now I just need to buy a WRT54GS router so I can have the 200mhz processor, 32mb ram, and 8mb flash all in a little tiny box. Cheapest local price was $89.